Jessica Pierce - The Last Walk: Reflections on Our Pets at the End of Their Lives

THE

Reflections on Our Pets

LAST

at the End of Their Lives

WALK

Jessica Pierce

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

CHICAGO AND LONDON

Jessica Pierce is a bioethicist and coauthor of Wild Justice: The Moral Lives of Animals.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

2012 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. Published 2012.

Printed in the United States of America

21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-66846-8 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-92204-1 (e-book)

ISBN-10: 0-226-66846-0 (cloth)

ISBN-10: 0-226-92204-9 (e-book)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Pierce, Jessica.

The last walk : reflections on our pets at the end of their lives/Jessica Pierce.

pages ; cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-66846-8 (cloth : alkaline paper)

ISBN-10: 0-226-66846-0 (cloth : alkaline paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-92204-1 (e-book)

ISBN-10: 0-226-92204-9 (e-book) 1. PetsDeathMoral and ethical aspects. 2. DeathMoral and ethical aspects. 3. Euthanasia of animals. 4. Euthanasia. 5. Human-animal relationships. 6. DogsBiography.

I. Title.

BD444.P54 2012

179.3DC23

2012007983

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO

z39.481992 (Permanence of Paper).

In honor and memory of Odysseus

Contents

Final Odyssey

Ody shuffles down the hall and stops at the doorway of my office, peering in at me with brown eyes made milky by age. He doesnt come all the way into the room to put a muzzle on my lap or push a nose under my hand as he used to. For Ody the greeting remains incomplete, a reminder that he now inhabits a different world.

I turn in my chair and call him. Though he doesnt come, I know he hears me. His stump of a tail flicks back and forth in reply. I also know, because we repeat this exchange day after day, what comes next. With a snort and a raspy cough, Ody will turn stiffly and make his way back down the hall, the click-drag click-drag of his nails telling me where he is headed. But I dont want him to go just yet.

I stand and step into the doorway. Kneeling, I take Odys face in my hands. His long ears are like velour under my fingers. I run my hands along his body, feeling the spongy lumps that bulge out here and there, like a super-sized Braille inscription. The lumps, the vet tells me, are fatty deposits called lipomas and are a harmless, if unsightly, manifestation of age. Despite his lumps and skin tags and white hair, Ody is still just as handsome to me as ever.

Repeating another familiar exchange, I lower my face and touch my nose to his. Ive always loved his nose, which is improbably colored to match the russet of his coat. I close my eyes and feel the cool roughness. His breath is a reminder of worn and broken teeth and of gums decayed by time. We remain here nose-to-nose for several long moments, and I then I stand up and turn back to my work. Ody shuffles off, click-drag, down the hall.

Ody is just over fourteen, and if you saw him on one of his occasional walks (he walks when the mood is right, and otherwise refuses to leave the house) you would know that he is an old dog. His back legs are atrophied and weak and bend awkwardly, and he stands as if he were halfway toward sitting. Every few steps one of his back legs fails to do its job, and he lands on top of his toes, rather than on his paw pad. Without support of the foot, the leg collapses, and his body dips and sways. This idiosyncrasy is most likely the result of some neurological dysfunction that causes the brain to send the wrong signals to the legs. It is one among several symptoms of cognitive dysfunction syndromein other words, Ody suffers from dementia.

Ody is nearing death. And the closer he draws toward the end, the more puzzled I become about what a good death would mean for him. It is pretty clear what a bad death looks like, and far too many animals in our world suffer a bad death, dying afraid, in pain, and alone or with strangers.

But what is a good death? The message I get from everything I read and all the people I talk to is that eventually Ody will reach a point at which his life becomes burdensome, and he will tell me, somehow, that he wants to be released. I will take him to the vet and the kindly people there will poke him with a needle and it will all be very quick and painless and gentle. But something about this scenario bothers me, like a splinter just under the skin of my conscience. And the closer Ody limps and shuffles toward this elusive endpoint, the less comfortable I become.

Is a natural death preferable, for Ody, to euthanasia? Why is it that we have such a revulsion against euthanasia for human beings, yet when it comes to animals this good death comes to feel almost obligatory? If it is an act of such compassion, shouldnt we be more willing to provide this assistance for our beloved human companions as well?

I worry: will I be able to read Odys signals? And I wonder: does life ever become so burdensome for an animal that he or she would prefer death, or is this something we have judged from the outside? Is it that their lives become burdensome for them, or for us? The more troublesome Ody becomesthe more he pees on the floor, the more often he barks for no reason at odd hours of the night, the more frequently he stands, confused and panting, in the middle of the kitchen while Im trying to cook dinnerthe more ambiguous the question of burdens becomes.

WHY I WROTE THIS BOOK

When Ody was about thirteen and a half, I decided to keep a journal about his life. Although he was still in relatively good health, I could see age wearing its tracks onto his body and mind. His health was starting to fail in small wayshe had had mast cell tumors removed from his ear and from his haunch, his hearing was fading, and he had to work a little to stand up. I began to write down the funny and annoying things that Ody spent his days doing, so that I would remember him in color and detail. And I recorded my reactions to watching him grow old. I thought it might help me work through the anguish of someday losing him, and the difficult decisions that I suspected lay in wait for us. I didnt know it at the time, but the Ody Journal was the beginning of this book.

Odys story soon became something more than personal. As a bioethicist, my work has focused on how the biomedical sciences intersect with human values, particularly within the context of healthcare. At the same time as I began writing my daily journal about Ody, I was finishing a large college-level textbook on bioethics. The ethics of death and dying has long been at the core of this field of applied philosophy, and one of the central chapters in the textbook focused on ethics at the end of life. I would sit at my desk, immersed in the literature about human death and dying and hear Ody retching in the background, as the water he just drank got stuck in his throat. I would have to get up from my work, frustratingly often, because he needed to go out and pee, again, or was barking at the door. It became obvious to me that many of the questions under discussion in human end-of-life care were similar to ones I might soon encounter with Ody. How aggressively should I treat his encroaching disabilities? How do I judge the quality of his daily life, as he experiences it? Might there ever come a time when his day-to-day living is filled with so much pain and fear that the humane course will be to hasten his death?